m1a,5 (war)

A completely extraordinary passage, since "immediate experience" and idleness are traced back to their "unsurpassed prefiguration" in the experience of war. The trajectory for experiences of idleness is from war to, in the nineteenth century, adventure, to early-twentieth-century fate, or total experience, which like war is "fatal from the outset." War as the basic nature of reality echoes the Futurists and fits with the overall materialism of the Arcades Project, though war as itself idleness is unexpected and seems like it would correlate instead with work experience. Here's there's a kind of reversal of earlier views such that work or long experience is evaluated more positively, since it would now be the opposite of war. However, we could also say that "total experience" might be conceived as the overlap of work experience and immediate experience, such that as in m1a,6 there is a merger of the two in the identification through empathy—so important for the flaneur—with exchange value, which is probably a key contemporary experience beyond what Benjamin might have dreamed in his most flaneurial moments. The discussion of how war and total human experience coincide is taken up by Paul Virilio in his book Total War.